Page 6 of Much Ado About Hating You (Second Chance Season #2)

Five

N o way in hell would Beatrice go anywhere with Peterson. Certainly not onto a lake. She was spitting mad, but at least she was spitting mad with Richard and not happy with some other nodcock.

Oh yes, he’d taken her meaning.

But had she ever taken a lover? That was the real question. He shouldn’t care. He did care. Some things just couldn’t be fought.

Her knuckles were white where she clutched the sides of the boat, her body a strung bow of tension.

“Calm down, hellcat. You’re safe. I’ve got you.”

She hissed.

He laughed.

“It’s not funny! I do not like large bodies of water! Take me back to shore now.”

“You were going to go out with Peterson.”

She shoved her nose into the air. Tried to. She couldn’t get a good angle with her arms spread to both sides of the boat. “He would have taken me inside instead. He knows what a woman wants.”

“How many innuendos are you going to throw at me? A more important question—have you taken the man into your bed?”

“Mr. Clark!” She snapped upright, crossing her arms over her chest. “How could you ask that?”

“Because you’ve been implying it. Have you?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Perhaps not, but I’d still like to know.” His entire body seemed to be waiting for an answer, though he wasn’t quite sure what he’d do with the information.

“A woman of my age and standing can take a lover if she pleases. As long as she’s quiet and careful about it.”

An evasion. He snorted.

“I do not care what you think.”

“I never thought you did.” He grinned.

“What? Why that”—she circled a finger at his face—“wily expression?”

He lifted the oars, dipped them into the water again, pulled, and watched as her gaze grew hazy, fixated on his arms. “You’re not scared anymore.”

She blinked and looked around, took a few steadying breaths and relaxed, her shoulders lowering, and her lips softening.

“You’re welcome,” he said.

Irritation blazed once more, bright in her eyes. “Oh yes, thank you for abducting me.”

“Come now, Beatrice, you’re safe with me. I swear it.”

“I’d rather hear a dog bark than listen to a man swear to protect me.”

“You know… you’re the only beautiful woman I have trouble charming.”

“Was that another attempt at charming me?”

“Did it work?”

“It never will.” A pause as she purposefully set her gaze away from him, looking out across the lake. “Why would you want to charm me?”

“You’re the sort of woman a man likes to please.”

“You’d rather please a cow, no doubt.”

“I shouldn’t have said that.”

“If it’s true…” Her voice trailed off as her shoulders tightened, threatened to cover her ears.

“It’s not.” Far enough into the lake now, the ground had dropped deep below them. He pulled one oar out of the water and set one in, using it to turn them in a slow circle until his back was to the broad center of the lake. “I apologized once, but now I will venture a clarification. I said it only because I was scared.”

Why not tell her. So much else he couldn’t tell her. This meeting, this renewal of acquaintanceship had brought back all the emotions he’d long fought to bury deep. He probably couldn’t make her look beyond their shared past or how he’d hurt her cousin, and he couldn’t tell her the one thing that might win her forgiveness for that. But he could try.

Not because he could have her. He never could. But he might be able to earn back her good regard.

He settled the oars in the water and rushed them forward with a backward stroke. “I was scared of seeing you again. And sometimes fear comes out ugly. Sometimes it comes out like a swiping claw. Or a hiss.” He grinned. “Hellcat.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“You hiss when you’re scared, swipe a sharp paw my way.”

“I’m not scared.”

“Very well.”

“You do not believe me!”

“Do you know”—he rested one oar in its bracket and tugged at his cravat before picking it up once more—“before you left in a rage seven years ago?—”

“A justifiable rage!”

“Yes, a righteous one. But that’s not the point. When you left, I was in the middle of a mission, one I never got to complete. Or even attempt.”

She rolled her eyes. “Learning Spanish. You do not need me for that, Mr. Clark. Hire a tutor.”

“None so pretty as you.”

“Richard.” Her voice a warning, a stone. Immovable. But… she’d used his given name, and she’d not done that for too damn long. Felt like the first rays of sun after a cold winter, the first drop of rain after a drought.

He picked up the oar once his cravat was loosened enough to let a cool breeze calm his fire-singed skin. “Learning Spanish was merely a maneuver, a means of accomplishing the true mission.”

“I’m sure you wish me to ask what it was, but I’ll not satisfy you.”

“Ah, but that’s the point— satisfaction . That was the mission.”

She finally looked at him, the thick brown slants of her brows lightly bending toward one another. “I do not see…”

“The satisfaction of tasting your lips.”

She gasped. “N-no. You did not want that.”

“I did.”

“Impossible.” But the look in her eyes—she knew the truth. She must have tasted it on his lips after Edmund’s funeral.

She’d been crying, and he couldn’t have that. Knew the best way to banish her tears was to rouse her ire.

“Didn’t know witches could cry, Bell,” he said, cornering her in the deserted stairway. “Or are those fake tears?” He turned his head every which way, inspecting her body. “Where’s the bottle? Show me.”

Her eyes flashed, the only remaining evidence of sorrow, the streaks across her cheeks. “Go away.”

He couldn’t. He’d not seen her in four damn years, and she was a vision, a mercy, a heartbeat. He pressed her against the wall. Still so bright. Edmund gone, Daniel exiled, Evelina a widow—their youthful group blasted and broken. But Beatrice Bell as bright as the sun. Still.

“Tell me how much you hate me,” he demanded. He needed to hear her speak of him with passion in her voice.

“I hate you,” she hissed.

He leaned into her, heard her back bump against the wall, and he braced his forearm on the stone just above her head. “You think of me.”

Her eyes flashed in the shadows, and her palms fluttered against his chest. Likely to push him away, though for now they rested. Only rested. “Only to imagine you trampled by a rampaging herd of horses escaped from Astley’s.”

He laughed, the first since his brother’s sentencing four years earlier. “You’re a goddamn delight, Beatrice Bell.” Then he kissed her, tipping her chin up with his knuckles and keeping her there until her lips began to move, until he was sure those palms on his chest did not intend to shove him down the stairs. Oh no, they curled into his coat, pulled him closer as her lips opened for him.

Damn. He slid his hand off the wall and curved it around her nape, tugging her closer, sighing into the kiss, tasting her hate, her pleasure.

Noise in the hallway.

She shoved him, slapped him, and with a chuckle, dark and dreary, he left her in the shadows. Alone.

Impossible that he’d thrown her in this boat today without wanting to kiss her? She had no idea.

“Entirely possible,” he said, meeting her fiery gaze with his steady one. “And you know it. You remember it.”

That stirred up silence. No sound but the splash of the oars and the slice of the boat through the water. She looked away from him again, but one hand, folded nicely in her lap, hovered upward. She touched her lips with her gloved fingertips.

And he allowed himself to look. Pink. The bottom lip full, pouty. The top one a series of hills and valleys, kissable little curves.

With a circle of one oar, he shifted their course, and with several hard strokes, he brought them to the far edge of the lake beneath the shade of a line of trees. He let the oars rest and studied the other boats dotting the lake. The men rowing them rested in the sun, leaning back, hats tipped over faces. The women turned to one another in intimate conversations.

Nothing so intimate as the semiprivacy of this little bower.

He shouldn’t kiss her. Even if she didn’t hate him, there was no future.

But goddamn it, couldn’t a man have something for himself? Some little thing to get him through the aching loneliness of a lifetime?

They didn’t even need a future. If she was intent on taking a lover, let it be him.

He leaned forward, reached out, plucked the fine muslin of her skirts where they spilled over the curve of her knee. That wrenched another gasp from her, this one smaller, more of a hot inhalation. Between his forefinger and his thumb, the muslin slid smooth and warmed by her body. He held on to it. That little pinch seemed enough to draw her forward, closer.

“Beatrice?” Her name a soft whisper that felt like a kiss as it brushed past his lips.

She curved nearer, as if he spoke too low for her to hear otherwise.

“Beatrice.” He said her name again. He liked how it felt on his tongue. “When I said I’d rather marry a cow than marry you, it was only because I never thought I would have a chance to marry you. It rather stings my pride, you know.” And something deeper than that. “Particularly because most days I’m certain you’re the only woman I could ever marry.”

Her head was shaking, curt little side-to-side movements. Her face was pinched. “You hate me. You think me not good enough. You think my cousin not good enough. You think?—”

“That’s not true. You’re much too good for me.” He didn’t want to talk about her cousin. “And when I feel like I might hate you, I think… that’s when I think I wish to marry you most.”

Her gaze met his, those pale-green eyes almost vibrating with… what? Some cavalry of emotion rampaging through her. “You are absurd.” She bit her lip. “But you are not absurd.” She closed her eyes, a little sound—half moan, half groan—rumbling in her throat. “I know because I have felt it, too. I hate you. I want you. Oh.” She dropped her face into her hands. “Row me back to shore.”

Row her back to shore? After that little revelation? “No, Beatrice. Not without a kiss first.”

Her head snapped up. “I hate you.”

His hand, sneaky little thief, stole toward her face, cupping her cheek. “I know. And I try to hate you, too.” Hating her the only way to survive loving her.

He kissed her. An inhale as he swiped his thumb across her jaw, then an exhale as he settled his lips lightly across hers. So lightly. A test. To see. What would she do?

Pull away and strike him with the palm of her hand?

Or give in and kiss him in return?

She did nothing, moved not a single muscle. Not even the breeze riled her hair. So he wrapped his hand around the back of her neck and pulled her closer. She startled, a little flinch of movement that bloomed her body into life. And she did not pull away. She did not strike him.

She melted into him, her hands finding the tops of his thighs and settling there as if they meant to stay. Her head tilted, slanting her lips across his in a new direction. Her fingertips curled into the wool of his breeches, past that into his muscle, sinking in hooks to catch him. As if she already hadn’t.

A wave of victory swept through him, tightening his muscles, heightening his need. He’d been waiting years for this, and he should kiss her carefully, risking nothing.

He could not.

Instead, he kissed her with years’ worth of longing pulsing at every point their bodies touched. He gave her the heat of his rage, the intensity of his sorrow, and the bittersweet joy of his pleasure. God, he’d missed her.

And he told her with that kiss.

He opened his mouth and deepened it, and his brave Beatrice didn’t flinch. She welcomed it, coasting closer to him. Her hands crawled up his abdomen, his chest, settled on his shoulders and squeezed. He felt each of her fingertips like coals, her nails sinking in and claiming him. No need for claiming. God, he was already hers. Had been for too damn long.

A crack from the nearby shore startled her, broke the seal of their kiss.

“Is someone watching?” She studied the shoreline with panicked eyes. “Did someone see?” She lifted a hand and began to wipe her mouth with the back of it, but he stopped her, holding her wrist.

“Do not wipe my kiss away.”

In the sun-yellow shadows, ire blazed to life in her eyes.

He used his other hand, still around her neck, to tug her closer. His knees, spread wide, made a little nest for her knees. He placed her hand, safe from wiping his kiss away, around his neck.

“There.” He sounded gruff. He kept his voice quiet. “This is how it should have been.” He did not think he’d done wrong with Martin and Selena. Except, perhaps, in that it had lost him this—her hand at his nape, her chest rising and falling with fast little breaths. He nudged his nose against the side of hers.

He must release her now. The idea tightened like a chain around his heart until it strangled, until it squeezed the damn organ into two jagged halves. When she left this little boat, this floating world for two, would she run to the arms of some other man? A lover. Peterson.

He did not want to know. But in the end, the words slipped out. “Have you kissed other men, Beatrice?”

Her hand on his neck squeezed, her body going rigid. “What does it matter?”

“It does not.”

“You think to own me? Or to shame me for my past? I’ll not allow it.” She tried to pull away from him.

But he held her nape tight, squeezed her thighs between his knees. “No, darling. No one can own a wild heart. And I’d never shame an independent mind.” He settled his forefinger and thumb at her chin, lifted it. “I want to be their champion. Your champion. And I want my kisses to be the only ones that matter. We do not always get what we wish for most, but maybe…” His voice softened. Her breath hitched. “Maybe if all I want is a kiss, I can have that.”